The Principles of Psychology

William James

5 ideas

1. Consciousness as a continuous selective stream

   Thought is not a chain of discrete ideas but a stream: always personal (owned by some self), always changing (no state recurs identically), sensibly continuous, and constantly selecting some objects and ignoring others. The stream has 'substantive parts' where it rests on images and 'transitive parts' where it is in flight between them. Feelings of relation, like 'and', 'but' or a tip-of-the-tongue gap, are real contents of mind that atomistic psychology leaves out.

2. Habit as the flywheel of life

   Living matter is plastic: it is weak enough to yield to repeated influence yet strong enough to keep the groove it has worn. Habit therefore fixes behaviour into automatic channels, which frees attention for new problems and keeps society stable, like a flywheel. The practical rule follows: make useful actions automatic as early as possible, start new habits with as strong a push as possible, allow no exceptions until the habit is rooted, and act on every resolution the first time the chance arises.

3. Bodily changes come before felt emotion

   The common view says we perceive a bear, feel fear, and then tremble and run. The theory reverses the order: the perception directly triggers bodily changes, and the emotion is our feeling of those changes as they happen. We feel sorry because we cry and afraid because we tremble. If you subtract every bodily symptom from an emotion in imagination, nothing emotional is left, so changing posture and expression can partly change the feeling.

4. Good memory means many retrieval paths

   Retaining a fact depends on a fixed physiological capacity. Recalling it depends on how many associative links connect it to other things we know. A 'good memory' is therefore mostly a well-organized one: each extra connection is another hook that can pull the fact back up. This is why cramming, which forms few links, is quickly forgotten, and why thinking a fact over in relation to many others is the only real way to improve memory.

5. Ansel Bourne becomes A. J. Brown

   In January 1887 the Rev. Ansel Bourne, an itinerant preacher, withdrew money from a bank in Providence, Rhode Island, and disappeared. Weeks later a man calling himself A. J. Brown opened a small shop in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and ran it quietly. In mid-March he woke in terror, knowing himself as Bourne and remembering nothing of the previous two months. When James hypnotized him in 1890, the 'Brown' personality returned and recalled the Norristown period, but it had no knowledge of Bourne's life. James uses the case as evidence that a single brain can sustain separate streams of personal memory and selfhood.

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